On 2 March Mr Okamoto, Chairperson of CLAIR, met with the Director and the Deputy Director of ACELG and discussed about ways to revitalise rural areas.
In Japan, we are concerned about the overconcentration of population in cities such as Tokyo.
As well, we have recently been trying to revitalise local areas in Japan. Mr Okamoto explained these issues, and ACELG introduced several projects conducted in Australia to revitalise rural areas.
ACELG introduced plans to create a core-base city system in a rural area, similar to what the Japanese government is now doing. We also discussed several ideas to attract young people living in local areas to enrol in their local university.
For example, the University of Tasmania has been successful to attract people all over the world because the university has become famous due to extremely specific areas like constitutional law and marine sciences. This example would be helpful for Japanese universities.
From the 3rd to the 13th of December, eight selected swimmers from the Fukuoka Swimming Association visited NSW, where they participated in joint training sessions with a local school and competed in the 2024-25 Speedo NSW Senior State Age Championships.
